


Old Habits

by flyingisland



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Love at First Sight, M/M, Minor Hunk/Romelle, Minor Lotor/Allura, Office Romance, Pining Lance (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 19:30:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17229872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland
Summary: An office Secret Santa exchange seems innocuous enough, at first, until whether by fate, or bad luck, or the hand of meddling peers, Lance receives the name of the same guy who he’s been pining after for a decade now.





	Old Habits

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kalakauuas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalakauuas/gifts).



> A special thanks to the always lovely [Traffy](http://oneyedkaneking.tumblr.com) for betaing this story for me!

In the early afternoon, just as the exhaustion of the workday begins to loom in the form of a thick raincloud of melancholy and cognitive dissonance over Lance’s slack and weary body, Hunk pops his head over the shared half-wall of their cubicles and catches his attention with a short, hissed,  _ ‘PSST!’ _

Lance rolls his eyes, rubbing both hands slowly over his face before raising his tired gaze from the text jittering on his computer screen to Hunk’s pursed lips. He drags in a deep breath, willing away the tension headache that’s gradually blossoming just between his eyebrows. They have three more hours until their shift is done, Lance can go home, and he can spend a few blissful hours forgetting that he’ll be forced to wake up at 7 am tomorrow and drag himself back to this low-lit Hell to dither away another small chunk of his life.

Hunk’s pesterings throughout the day are truthfully a Godsend, but Lance has never learned how to communicate his misery here through more than the occasional well-timed eye-roll and a few choice Caveman-esque grunts and moans.

So he doesn’t ask Hunk what he wants when Hunk alerts his attention, but he does wait eagerly to hear whatever he has to say, in hopes that it might break up the monotony of just another Tuesday at this boring, terrible office.

“Dude, did you get your Secret Santa pairing? I think it’s rigged, man. I think HR has been collecting data on all of us because—I just—I think this is  _ way _ too convenient!”

Lance can hear himself grumbling out words more than he really registers that he’s speaking them. He’s slumped lower on his desk now, splayed out in a boneless, listless way with his chin resting on the glossy fake wood patterned paper of its surface.

“They made us fill out a questionnaire, Hunk, do you seriously not remember doing that? And HR doesn’t even run the Secret Santa, that’s Allura and Coran; you know, the party-planning committee?”

Hunk sucks in the side of his cheek, tapping his finger over his lip as though he’s trying very hard to recall ever filling out the fat stack of stapled papers that Coran had handed out to them nearly a month ago. Lance vividly remembers contemplating if asking for a new coffee maker to replace his broken one would be too much, or if he should have defaulted to candy like he usually did. The price limit, after all, was only set at $20. He can’t imagine that anyone sans Hunk would find him important enough to shell out more than that. But he’d spotted a few discount models at the department store when he’d browsed there before. And he’d wondered if he could be lucky enough to be granted a partner who would understand how desperately he needed to be caffeinated in order to make it through the day.

Already, his pre-work Starbucks runs are becoming expensive. He wonders if the boss would write him up if he opted instead to mount an IV drip filled with pure caffeine right at the entrance of his cubicle.

Maybe he should have asked for that instead. He still feels a little selfish for requesting something as fancy as a coffee maker for a budgeted, totally work-related event, even though he’d added a small note in the margins of the paper about the discount ones at the department store.

He shakes his head, pushing himself up to his elbows and typing a few random symbols into the first bar of his excel sheet. Hunk is drumming his fingers against the edge of their shared wall now. He’s whipping his head back and forth at random intervals as though he truly believes that Big Brother will swiftly disappear him into the night, without a trace, for even allowing the mere concept to cross his mind, of sharing this juicy information with another worker ant during business hours.

“Listen, man,” he says urgently, clipped and whispered and breathless, “They paired me up with Romelle— _ Romelle _ , Lance! How did they know?! I haven’t told anyone but you!”

It takes Lance a moment to remember that Hunk has been crushing on Romelle since the two of them started working here. It takes a substantial amount of self-control not to bark a laugh and tell Hunk that hitting Romelle with a freight train while screaming, “I have a huge crush on you” through a megaphone would be more subtle than he’s been all this time. It’s clear to most people around the office that he’s been vying after her attention, to everyone but maybe Romelle, the airhead herself. Lance knows of Allura’s penchant for playing matchmaker painfully well. He knows that while she’s considerate and well-meaning, she’s helpful to an almost sadistic level. And he knows that she’s perceptive, too, and that she must have been keeping an eye on all of them and perhaps even taking notes, just to formulate an attack plan, surely titled: “The Perfect Secret Santa for a Romantic Office Christmas”. He feels dread pooling his belly when he contemplates opening the sealed envelope that she’d dropped off on his desk just before he returned from lunch break earlier. He’s been putting it off since then, decidedly ignoring its existence under the pile of blank printer paper that he’d pointedly shoved it underneath. 

At first, he’d thought that he’d wait until the end of his shift to open it. He’d swing by the store on his way home and pick up something simple and inexpensive enough that he wouldn’t have to think about it for another three weeks until the Christmas party. Maybe enough time would pass that he’d be willing to actually wrap it. But he could wipe his hands of it early, so he wouldn’t be forced to think about work outside of work hours more than he absolutely had to. Frankly, he wouldn’t have even signed up if Allura hadn’t looked so pitiful while she’d asked—and he knows that this was calculated as well, just as he knows that he’s still absolutely incapable of saying no to her when she offers him those big, watery, puppy-dog eyes. 

He sighs. In a swift, hard click of his finger against the backspace key, he deletes the jibberish that he entered on his excel sheet.

“Who cares how they figured it out, Hunk? This is your chance, right? To find the perfect gift for under $20 that just screams,  _ ‘I’m madly in love with you, please marry me and bare my children!’ _ This is your opportunity to create your own Christmas miracle!”

Hunk doesn’t like it, but Lance is too tired to care. He knows that Hunk will come around eventually anyway, that once he stops stressing about this so much, he’ll realize that Lance is right, that someone (Allura, obviously) has been looking out for him, and this is truly his greatest opportunity to buy a gift for the girl who he’s been crushing on for three years now without seeming like a total weirdo for doing it. Lance wishes that everything in life were that cut and dry, but instead of dwelling on that, or trying to remember which algorithm he’s supposed to input onto the excel sheet, he pushes himself up from his seat instead.

“I need coffee,” he announces, “You want some, Casanova?”

Hunk doesn’t appreciate that either, but he does want coffee.

When Lance glances at the clock, hanging just above the boss’s office door, he notices that it’s seven minutes behind. And Mr. Zarkon won’t let them leave by any clock other than that one, no matter how many times they’ve tried to compare it to their phones or watches or the clocks at the corner of their computer screens.

Today is really not his day.

Already, he just wants to go home and sleep. 

 

* * *

 

The coffee maker gurgles just as miserably as Lance feels as he braces his weight on his arms, with his hands propped firmly against the edge of the counter. He’s hanging his head low between them, turning his neck slowly as he flexes the muscles there, trying desperately to work out the kinks. His lanyard with his keycard encased in its plastic housing clacks between his stomach and the counter just in front of him. The headache between his eyebrows hasn’t gotten much better, and he hopes that upping his caffeine dosage might be the placebo that he needs to get him through the rest of the afternoon. The break area still smells like stuffing and reheated turkey. He doesn’t feel hungry enough to pick through the leftovers from their recent Thanksgiving party. He definitely isn’t willing to spend more time in this area than he absolutely has to, feeling the dread already shuddering under his skin and sitting heavily in his belly when he can hear the voice of the Office Asshole boasting loudly just a little ways away. He spends roughly eighty percent of his shift hiding out in here, Lance knows, but he isn’t above telling their boss that he’d witnessed someone else wasting time here. Lance isn’t sure if he’d be better or worse if he were the boss’s son. He doesn’t know if he’d come in and kick up his feet and spend hours chatting with brown-nosing sycophants or online shopping when he should be working if he knew that he wouldn’t get in trouble for it at all.

But he still despises Lotor for doing it, still hates him for being such a snitch when he could at least have the courtesy to mind his own goddamn business. And when Lance hears someone push open the break room door, he grits his teeth, already feeling the efforts of his half-assed office yoga sessions undoing themselves as tenseness takes over every muscle in his body. He shoves himself away from the counter, not bothering to look behind him at the new intruder or to greet them at all as he fetches a mug from the cabinet above and paces just a little closer to the coffee maker. He has a feeling that Lotor was the jackass who didn’t start a new pot after finishing one off either. Just like a selfish little daddy’s boy not to have any regard for his tired coworkers. And what does he have to drink coffee for anyway?! It’s not like he actually works enough to get tired! It’s not like there’s any good reason for him to guzzle their valuable energy beans when other people around here are dying, goddammit!

“Hey, are you okay?”

Lance swings around before he can stop himself. He’s so enraged at this point that he’s willing to risk it all if only to finally put that snide-faced little weasel in his place once and for all.

But his finger shoves into the face of someone who is notably not Lotor. Their eyes aren’t narrowed in a calculated, studying sort of way. Their lips aren’t turned up and pulled tight in a smug grin over curiously sharp canines. Their dumb, unprofessionally long hair isn’t pulled back so tight that Lance has always prayed to stick around long enough to witness the day that it finally starts falling out—and they’re handsome in a way that doesn’t piss Lance off.

And he recognizes this person watching him with wide, worried eyes. He can see his deflated reflection in the dark pools of them, can map out a perfect smooth expanse of ivory skin that’s surely never known a blemish. His breath stalls in his throat as he realizes how much he’s dwarfed by this person, how their wide and angular shoulders extend so much further than his own, how this person could encase him, could wrap themselves around him and there would be no part of him free from that softness or that warmth.

Lance knows that he’s a hypocrite for teasing Hunk about his crush.

But in his defense, Shiro only started working here two months ago, and Lance has been in love with him since he was a sophomore, and Shiro was a senior, in high school.

“I—uh—yeah, yeah I’m… I’m fine just—hired—HOT—I mean tired, and… Tired and hot! Because of… the heat! The heat in here is turned up way too high, right? It’s—I’m, I’m boiling in here, man, phew, it’s… I’m in Hell, I’m… I’m burning in Hell right now, I… I gotta go.”

He dips out before Shiro can say anything in response, ducking around Shiro’s firm bicep, scurrying through the door with his tail between his legs and a still-empty mug in his shaking hands.

Hunk starts complaining when he sees that Lance has returned with no coffee, but the moment that he pops up over their shared wall and really takes in Lance’s scarlet, flustered face, his mouth slaps closed so quickly that there’s an audible smack.

The adrenaline is enough to keep Lance alert for the rest of his shift, at least.

And once everyone else files out, as Lance collects his things, he finally finds the will to tear open his Secret Santa letter and figure out who he needs to buy a gift for.

The bold, graceful calligraphy is befitting of the name “Takashi Shirogane”, and Lance decides that no level of puppy dog eyes will make this worth it next year.

He’s doomed to live a miserable life.

He feels guilty, suddenly, for telling Hunk that getting paired with his crush could be a good thing.

Because right now, all that he really feels like doing is marching to the boss’s office putting in his two week’s notice.

 

* * *

 

A fifteen-year-old Lance McClain had laid eyes on Takashi Shirogane for the very first time at a homecoming game that he attended as a bright-eyed freshman with Hunk, and their friend Pidge, by his side. He’d been sitting in the stands, flipping idly through his phone as Hunk and Pidge waited in line for snacks. He’d been aggravated about an opinionated post that his aunt had made on Facebook, and he’d been hovering his thumb over the reply button for a few minutes at that point, caught between his trained urge to duck his head and keep his mouth shut, and his newly-learned sense of independence urging him to make his own opinion known.

It had been the height of drama, at the time, in his young mind. His mood had been so sour at that point, when he’d decided instead to stew in all of the could-be replies that were swirling around in his head as he turned off the screen of his phone, that he hadn’t even been looking forward to watching the game.

Takashi Shirogane, or at that time, simply named “The Hottest Guy in the Entire Universe” had strolled past just at the outskirts of the field, a camera slung over his wide shoulders, a toothy grin breaking out over his full lips as he laughed at whatever another shorter, grinning boy was telling him down below. Shiro was tall and built like a brick wall. He was chiseled in all of the right places, and the guilty peeks that Lance stole of his back end yielded perky, rounded results that made his cheeks burn. He looked as though he belonged as a player on the field instead of the guy just photographing it, or even a model on the other end of the camera, splayed out wanton and seductive as he advertised some swanky cologne brand or men’s clothing line that only the top 1% of the country could ever hope to afford.

He’d been picturesque as he’d shuffled around the coach and players, as he paused his conversation with the other boy who he walked with to snap a photo of the mascot who Lance knew to be Pidge’s brother, Matt, under that ridiculous lion head. Matt had thrown up peace signs and posed in wild ways with the cheerleaders and any passing player that he could grab. Shiro had laughed again, reaching out to pat Matt on the back before he moved on. Lance had been entranced by the way that he’d moved, how he’d weaved so delicately through the thick throngs of people around him as though he didn’t tower largely over all of them. When Pidge and Hunk returned, he hadn’t had the will to listen to their conversation, and he barely took a few bites of the hot dog that they’d given him until Pidge eventually snagged it from him. He’d watched Shiro through the moving players, watched the way he bent at the knee and how he poised his camera in front of his face. How he’d stood so still and unmoving to get a perfect shot for what Lance presumed to be the school paper or the yearbook. Like a big cat engineered perfectly to kill, well-oiled and precise like a machine, Takashi Shirogane worked efficiently and gracefully. Lance would have given anything at that moment to flip through his camera roll and admire the shots that he’d taken.

He could imagine a man so enamored and handsome wrapped in the dark red glow of the development room. He could envision vividly how he’d poke his photos into whatever fluid they used to make the images appear on the paper, and how gently he’d hang them, how he’d step back to admire his work in that shadowed, warm and small enclosure. 

Lance imagined that Shiro might feel the same swell of admiration as he gazed upon his artful photographs that Lance was feeling in that moment, watching him work. His heart had thumped hard in his chest, his throat had felt thick and constricted, and his lungs had ached as he forgot how to breathe.

And he’d thought, in that elongated, torturous, brief flash of a moment that felt to be a thousand years as Shiro paused to look through his camera roll and the light breeze pushed the dark bangs from his face so beautifully—

_ ‘Oh, fuck. This is love, isn’t it?’ _

And things, from then on, had only gone downhill.

Even though, admittedly, these days Shiro probably still believes that he met Lance for the first time when he started working at this job.

Lance had thought when Shiro had graduated, that those silly, childish feelings for him might have gone away. And he’d forgotten about them for a very long time. He’d worked his way through high school and enrolled in college. He’d gotten his associates in media management before he’d snagged a job, bright-faced and naive, at his current company. Working with Hunk had seemed promising, at least. He’d been more than a little surprised when Shiro had applied a few years later.

He’d thought that someday he’d hear about Shiro photographing models in Tokyo or Amsterdam. He’d been positive that he’d see his name cited in newspapers and popular magazines someday. A person like Shiro was special, he did amazing things and made a name for himself. A person like Shiro had no place in a tiny, two-story office with creaky, poorly insulated windows and a ceiling that sometimes leaked water when it rained hard enough. Shiro definitely didn’t look quite right under the harsh glow of the fluorescents, or half-asleep and yawning with bedhead, dragging himself into the building for another miserable 9-5 with the rest of their loser co-workers. Lance spends a lot of time wondering what horrible thing must have happened to bring him here, why he’d decided that his beautiful, dark hair needed to be dyed white, or if it actually lost its color so early naturally. And where the scars came from, the prosthetic arm, the strange, new things that don’t quite sit right with his memories, that allude to so many foreign experiences folded tightly in the time that they’ve been apart, of a life that Lance has been vacant from for so long that sometimes, he almost doesn’t recognize Shiro as the same sweet guy with the soft smile and bright, rapturous laughter that he’d fallen so hard for when he was a kid.

But Lance is jaded too, and Shiro is still just as kind as he his handsome. Lance knows that the silver fox look suits a thirty-year-old version of Shiro a lot better than it has any business doing so. And he knows that somewhere, deep down, Shiro is still the same guy who Lance lovingly stalked from afar for so many years.

But it’s hard to imagine himself having the guts to present him with a gift, to talk to him longer than he absolutely has to. He’d never had the nerve to confront the guy with his feelings when he was young, and he’s definitely too chickenshit to do so now. The weight of his unspoken feelings presses perpetually against the dam of his own self-doubt. He feels like the levee might break any day now, and if he finds himself stuck in a conversation with Shiro, he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stop himself before he breaks and blurts out everything that he’s been keeping secret all this time.

He’s just never been very good at keeping his thoughts and opinions to himself. That day, when he was a teen, he’d gone home and written his snarky response to his aunt anyway, when he’d remembered it. And even now, years later, she still doesn’t write his name on the Christmas card that she sends every year to his mom.

And Shiro isn’t an aunt who he sees maybe once every two years at a family reunion. He isn’t an asshole like Lotor who Lance would love nothing more than to never see again. Lance cares about his thoughts and feelings. He wishes, more than anything, that he were strong enough or smart enough or tight-lipped enough to exist for an extended period of time in his presence without making a fool out of himself. 

He thinks about all of this as he gets ready for work the next morning. He washes his face, and he takes a moment, with the water dripping down over the sharp curve of his chin, to really look at his reflection. He remembers doing the same thing a lot as a kid—wondering how he might have to rearrange his features to make him attractive enough to catch Shiro’s eye. He’d have to be bigger, thicker around the neck, maybe. He’d need to bulk up in ways that no amount of gym time has ever done for him. He used to be athletic in high school—running track and spending one semester on the swim team before the chlorine dried his skin out beyond the amount that he could reasonably handle before he lost his mind. He’s always been filled out in a slimmer way, but he knows that this wouldn’t be attractive to a human-shaped tank like Takashi Shirogane. Surely, he chases something just as beautiful and perfectly crafted as himself. Atlas, after all, carried the weight of the entire world, and in the same way, Lance can’t imagine that someone like Shiro, someone so carefully molded and so strong, and firm, and absolutely artful would even find contentment dragging his pathetic little bag of bones and subtle muscle definition around everywhere he goes.

He pushes out a sigh, running pomade-coated fingers through his hair to give it some semblance of definition. He wonders if Shiro has to do anything with himself in the morning to look so beautiful, or if he just rolls out of bed, brushes his teeth and washes his face, and he’s ready for the day. He wonders if, like in high school, Shiro always seemed to be taken by one guy or another, always surrounded by a gaggle of adoring fans, never left alone to muse the new-forming dark circles under his eyes, or the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth, or the way that this job has aged him and withered away any semblance of childish hope that he might have carried with him from college, anything pure or good or soft that might actually make another person believe that the light inside of him is still burning.

At the end of it, once he finishes gargling his mouthwash and rinses his mouth, when he dresses and collects his things, he doesn’t have the will to look at his reflection any further. He knows that he wasn’t the person that Shiro needed back then, just as he isn’t now. He understands with vivid clarity that he might never see this stupid, childish crush through, and maybe now’s the time to finally move on from it.

He’ll buy whatever silly thing Shiro has written on his list. He’ll present it to him with a practiced ease that he’ll spend the rest of the month rehearsing in private. And when he witnesses the lack of registration in Shiro’s features, when he finally gets his answer—that Shiro doesn’t remember him, that he even knew of him in the first place—maybe then Lance will be allowed to put these feelings to rest and move on with his life, once and for all. 

Maybe, at the end of the day, Allura did him a favor by pairing the two of them up. Maybe she knew that Lance needed affirmation.

It’ll be fine, he thinks, he’s a big boy.

He can handle rejection, even if it’s at the big, gentle hands of the one person who he’s never been able to stop thinking about, even after all of this time.

 

* * *

 

 

Hunk, having spent many days and late nights listening to Lance lamenting his hopeless, dead-end romantic ventures with one Takashi Shirogane, is perplexed when Lance admits to him during their first break of the morning that he got the guy for the office Secret Santa. 

“Wait—you… you’re not… still _ into  _ him, are you?”

He’s holding his mug of coffee close to his chest, leaning his backside against the counter as he stretches his legs. It’s eleven in the morning, and a few of the late arrivals are filing in as Lance and Hunk discuss this. Lance can feel the hair on the back of his neck standing on end as he hears Lotor’s booming voice wishing everyone a good morning. He resists the urge to poke his head out of the break room and yell back,  _ “You know, some of us were actually here in the morning! It’s the afternoon now, buddy!” _

But Hunk is still looking at him as though he expects a response, and Lance knows that he’s not going to be happy when he hears just how many times Lance has now replaced his childish rom-com fantasies of kissing Shiro on the football field or under the garish prom decorations with finding the two of them alone in the utility closet while Lance searches for cardstock and Shiro looks for… pens, or tissues, or some other mundane garbage that might force them together in such an enclosed space.

He breathes in and out deeply, setting his own half-drank coffee on the counter next to Hunk and shoving both hands in his pockets. His muscles tingle as he scuffs a foot over the linoleum. The residual sluggish ache from yesterday sleeps deep in his muscles, and he isn’t sure if he’ll ever feel totally okay, for the rest of his life, after spending so many hours slumped over in the same spot day after day.

“I mean—I—I don’t know, man. He’s still cute, right? It’s not like I’ve spent the last few years pining after him every day while he was gone, but… now that he’s back, it’s not like those feelings just went away, you know? I wouldn’t say that I’m _ ‘still into him’ _ , but I’m not  _ not _ into him either…”

Hunk shakes his head. He’s smiling just a little, around the edges of his lips, and his gaze trails from Lance’s warm face to the rest of the office moving about outside of the shudders of the break room window. 

“You had it bad for him in high school… I guess it would be weird if you didn’t feel something for him now, right?”

Lance bites his lip, furrowing his brows as more hot color rises to his cheeks. Lotor is telling some story to a small group of women through the window. His arms are moving about in long, sweeping motions. Lance can hear the grating vibrato of his voice, but he can’t completely make out the words. He can feel the annoyance humming under his skin, mingling with the embarrassment that he currently feels, and making him all the more miserable, already, so early in the day.

Across the room, the clock above the fridge ticks away. Their break will be over in two minutes, and Lance is already subconsciously plotting a path back to his desk that doesn’t require him to walk by Lotor, and find himself expected to wish him a good morning as well. The only problem, he finds, is that the quickest and least suspicious path that he could take brings him through Allura’s area of the office, and he also isn’t looking forward to having to pretend, to her innocent, smiling face, that he’s absolutely jazzed about the personal, vicious attack that she unknowingly unleashed on him with this Secret Santa. 

He still feels conflicted about it, even though a guilty, voyeuristic part of him was just a little excited to read through Shiro’s $20 wishlist as though it might be able to clue him in on just what kind of personal life the guy is leading these days. It had felt almost forbidden to look through it—to take in the small variety of candies and color schemes that he was interested in, before settling his eyes on the three top requests—a few new mystery novels, some brand of sporty water bottle that Lance has heard people mention in passing frequently around the office, and, curiously, a short note at the bottom:

_ ‘Handmade gifts are more than welcome!’ _

Lance, at the time, had convinced himself wholeheartedly that the small stab of admiration that he felt was natural given the words on the page. Any reasonable person with a soul couldn’t resist smiling at the thought of Shiro enthusiastically accepting a pair of knitted mittens, or a scarf. But that had gotten the cogs turning in his brain, thinking back to the days in college when he’d budgeted his skincare and bath products and realized that making them from scratch would have been more gentle on his meager spending allowance after food and bills. He’d gotten good enough at making bath bombs that his mom had asked for him to make some for all of her friends, and she’d touted this proudly, suggested to him playfully a few times that he should have dropped the college thing altogether and simply opened his own skincare store.

He tells Hunk as much—that he might consider trying his hand at something more personalized, and Hunk’s worried look in response is more than enough to knock the wind straight out of his sails. 

“Are you sure, man?” Hunk asks then, quiet and just a little bit concerned as his eyes snap back in Lance’s direction, “I mean… are you trying to tell him that you’re into him, because that’s… pretty big, right? I mean if Romelle gave me something that she made by hand, I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from wondering if she, you know—”

“But you’re already interested in her,” Lance argues, feeling suddenly defensive, even though he knows, deep down, that Hunk is probably right, “Do you really think that Romelle would automatically just assume that you have a thing for her if you, I don’t know, baked her something? Wouldn’t she just assume that you just like baking?”

Hunk purses his lips, a sour expression washing over his face as he takes a few short sips of his coffee. Lance feels a little bad for putting him on the spot like this, but he feels like, of all the people that they know, they should at least be able to be real with each other. Hunk’s feelings for Romelle have been kept just about as secret as Lance’s for Shiro—between the two of them at least, since Lance would rather die than be anywhere near as obvious about his affections as Hunk has been thus far—and he feels sometimes, that if he doesn’t talk to someone about these emotions, he might explode. He might burst apart in a massive supernova of unrequited affections, pulverized from the inside out by the ever-present drowning feeling that is chasing after a person who barely even realizes that you exist.

He knows that it’s pointless to continue feeling this way for Shiro. He wishes that he could turn it off. Many times in high school, he’d elected to ignore it, to go about his life as a normal teenager might. To pretend that he wasn’t basically the most idiotic person in the entire universe, for falling so hard for someone who he’d frankly never even shared a conversation with. This had been made difficult by just how popular of a student Shiro was, unfortunately. It seemed like he never spent a minute in class, although the gossip that Lance would often hear around the halls and whispered during study hall and lunch periods might have convinced him otherwise, given how often girls would gush about what a “perfect package” he was. Artistic, attractive, tall, and a straight-A student. Shiro would go on to graduate as valedictorian, he’d move away to attend a prestigious school. But all word of him would be cut off abruptly, all gossip halted to radio static that Lance had decided was only his own sudden disinterest. He stopped seeking out information about Shiro’s journey into the adult world. He’d moved on. And he hadn’t considered that perhaps something had happened to Shiro during their time apart—something that might have brought them together again. Something that might have stolen just a little bit of the gentle light from Shiro’s eyes.

The Shiro now, he knows, is even less likely to remember a scrawny little onlooking admirer who never had the guts to approach him than he was to even notice Lance back then.  Perhaps there’s a part of him that might recall the track meet that he sat in on to take photos for the school paper—the single, idiotic runner who glanced over and met his eyes before wiping out hard during a simple hurdle that the rest of the runners had cleared easily. He might also remember Lance as the sole loser who clung to the walls during the winter dance—but that’s doubtful, at least. That one, Lance knows, is more than likely just his insecurity talking, since Shiro himself had been surrounded by such a thick gaggle of friends and a date wearing a matching purple flower on the collar of his tux, that surely he hadn’t had the time to look around and witness all of the dateless losers who still attended for the sake of festering in their own lonely misery.

But Lance remembers Shiro as he was, and he still finds himself drawn to him as he is now. There’s a pitiful part of him, still stunted in his teenage years. Still pimple-faced and embarrassed by the gawkiness of his own limbs, the awkwardness with which he still carries himself. It’s been ten years since Lance first witnessed Shiro in all of his perfection, snapping photographs of the passing football players, but he can’t stop himself from feeling as though, even now, he’s restricted to the stands, while Shiro exists in a different bubble altogether. He’s just never figured out how to get up and walk down. How to approach him and strike up a conversation. Here, technically, Lance is in a higher position. Lance, as a lowly accountant, and Shiro working in graphic design. Lance, having worked here for three plus years, and Shiro, still a new, bright-eyed grunt. But Shiro, as a person, will always seem better than everyone else. Lance knows that he could witness him cleaning toilets and he’d still have a hard time not calling him “sir”. He knows that even a Shiro on his worst day, in the worst condition, is leagues better than Lance at his best. 

And he knows that something as silly as Secret Santa around the office isn’t going to change that. Even if, somehow, he could make him the perfect gift—something that would absolutely knock his socks off—it still wouldn’t be enough. Shiro is kind, and he’s considerate, and he notices things about people that others sometimes overlook. Lance knows that Shiro was renowned in school for being the most popular shoulder to cry on. He knows that Shiro’s valedictorian speech at graduation was so inspirational that a few staff and students cried. He knows that Shiro would appreciate anything that he gifted him, that he’d cherish it and remember it always, but… There’s a limit to anyone’s kindness. And being kind doesn’t mean that Shiro owes him anything else, especially not his attraction or love or affection. 

They’re too different. In life, and in love, and even back in high school, Shiro will forever be the man who lives vividly in each moment, and Lance, still stuck on the stands, will never have the courage to approach him.

But maybe, in this small way, he can try.

He doesn’t expect it to amount to anything. He assures Hunk that he won’t go overboard as they rinse out their coffee cups and head back into the office when their break ends.

But he holds onto that thought for the rest of his shift. He looks up prices for various skin care ingredients online. He doesn’t get a lot of work done today, but he feels refreshed as he punches his time card.

He doesn’t expect much from this. He doesn’t think that it will end in romance, or Shiro remembering him, or even a big display of gratitude that somehow makes his decade-long crush feel worth it. But it will be nice to know that he finally made Shiro smile.

Maybe, once and for all, before he finally wipes his hands of these silly, childish feelings.

 

* * *

 

At the water cooler, the next Monday, at roughly 2 pm, Lance decides to take a short, standing nap just to rest his eyes against the overbearing lights overhead. The water cooler itself is tucked away in a private corner, just three cubicles away from Romelle’s workstation. He can hear her chatting idly on the phone with someone who is decidedly not a client, fretting over some task that their boss has asked her to do that she’s determined is well above her pay grade. He resists the temptation to tell her to join the club—he shouldn’t be expected to put together presentations for Lotor either, or to clean out the recycle bin every Friday, or to wipe down the sink and dump out the old coffee grounds when a certain snobby asshole leaves things in such disarray that Lance feels too guilty for the janitorial staff to leave it as it is. But telling Romelle that this dictatorship isn’t fair to anyone would require clueing her in to his general location, then, potentially, actually having a conversation with another human being, which he’s too tired to really have the strength for right now.

Romelle is nice enough, he knows. There’s a good reason why Hunk has such a thing for her. Sure, if there was any semblance of “shitty office awards” around this Hellhole, she’d definitely win the ribbon for “breaks the copy machine the most times” or “set off the fire alarm while trying to reheat her lunch still in its tinfoil”, but he can’t judge a person for being absent-minded around this place, when he knows better than anyone that it’s nothing more than a defense mechanism designed to keep her sane. Outside of work, during the fleeting outings that they’ve gone on together to bars or restaurants after their shifts or during lunch, Romelle is funny and personable. She cares about people, and she still remembers Lance’s birthday even though she doesn’t have to. She buys everyone those childish Valentines cards that come in the bulk packs for grade schoolers, and she makes sure that everyone gets a piece of candy with their card. She offered to rub Hunk’s shoulders after an especially stressful day in accounting, and Lance hadn’t thought at the time that he’d ever hear the end of it. 

Lance knows that the people around this office are nice people, sans maybe a few bad eggs. He knows that this isn’t high school anymore—even though he also knows that Romelle and Allura were popular. Lotor made top grades at his stupid rich kid universities. Shiro had more scholarship offers than any person could ever hope to spend, and even Hunk himself was on the Dean’s list every semester until he got his degree. Lance knows that they’re all on equal ground now. It doesn’t matter that he only went to community college. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t have a date to the prom. 

It doesn’t even matter that Shiro doesn’t remember him. They’re all adults now, the past is behind them. And now, after all of those years spent feeling intimidated by these near-celebrities at school, he’s found himself working as their peer.

He’s thinking about this, about the possibilities that he could very well be ignoring now that there’s no such thing as “leagues” or being unpopular as an adult, working the same job as everyone else at the same crappy company. He’s leaning his forehead against the water cooler, hopefully, positioned in a way that looks as though he might just be refilling his cup if anyone were to walk by. 

He’s wondering now if things could have been different for himself and Shiro, starting over here, if he’d been more willing to actually start over fresh. He’d made the mistake of assuming that Shiro knew just how long he’d pined after him, that Shiro could somehow have any inkling of who he is after Lance himself has built such an altar to him in his heart. 

But Shiro, of course, hadn’t registered his name when he’d shakily introduced himself again. He hadn’t seemed to even recognize the feeling of Lance’s eyes on his skin, when he’d stuck out his hand to shake Lance’s and said,  _ “It’s nice to meet you! I’m Takashi Shirogane, but most people call me Shiro. Where are you from? I grew up around here, but I moved away for college.” _

Lance had felt like an absolute idiot while he admitted, red-cheeked and barely comprehensible, that he’s lived here all his life. He’d made a point of omitting his graduation year, in hopes that his young face might hold up just firmly enough that Shiro would decide that they must have never gone to school together.

He’s musing this, only half-aware, when he feels someone prod the back of his shoulder with their fingers. He jerks upright, the water half-filled in his wax-coated cup sloshing around just enough to sprinkle a few drops on his dress shirt.

“I—uh, sorry, the—the tap is kinda jammed. I… was having trouble getting water… out…”

His words trail off into an indecipherable squeak. When he turns to face the person behind him, heart throbbing in his chest when he considers finding his boss there, or the sniveling asshole, Lotor, who would surely embellish the retelling of this interaction to the point where Lance would find himself jobless over allegedly sleeping curled up on the table where they keep the napkins and throw-away cups next to the cooler. But he isn’t expecting the worried face that greets him—the white hair and the dark eyes, the subtle pink scar dragged across the bridge of a perfect, broad nose. The full lips pursed in concern and the thick, manicured brows drawn low in confusion.

“Are you okay?” Takashi Shirogane, local God in the flesh, asks unknowingly, innocently, serene and almost song-like, for how beautiful even those words sound filtering through his gorgeous, kissable lips, “Do you want me to escort you to HR? Maybe you can go home early?”

Lance’s lips quiver, his eyes dart away. He finds that, up close, it’s even harder to look at something as substantially gorgeous as Shiro for too long. 

“I-I’m okay, I’m just… tired.”

It’s the most coherent thing that he’s ever managed to say to Shiro before, and privately, Lance is more than a little proud of himself for it. It feels like a step in the right direction, at least, being able to say even one thing to the guy’s face without immediately bolting for the nearest exit. Maybe moving on really will be in his future somewhere. Maybe, someday, after he gives Shiro his present and accepts the fact that nothing will ever be quite as wonderful as Shiro deserves, or nearly good enough to catch his attention in the right way—maybe someday Lance can find himself looking into Shiro’s dark, kind eyes and he’ll feel nothing romantic for him at all.

He can dream, at least, even though that moment definitely isn’t right now.

He realizes, just a few moments too late, that Shiro, wax-coated throwaway cup in hand, is actually just waiting for him to move so he can get himself some water.

Lance apologizes quickly and profusely, ducking out of the way and leaning his hip against the table just next to the cooler. Shiro thanks him, smiling softly. He learns forward and pushes down the tab, and when water flows effortlessly from it, he at least has the decency not to say anything about it. 

He takes a short sip, lowering the cup and grasping it between both hands, still smiling. 

“Are you doing the Secret Santa?” he asks, and oh, God, he really wants to do small talk, doesn’t he? He really thinks that Lance is capable of more than just simple, one-word answers right now. “I got my person’s name last week, and… I don’t think they remembered that the limit was $20.”

He laughs then, seemingly unperturbed by Lance’s lack of response, or the colorful new shades that his skin is turning at rapid speed, the longer he stands here under the weight of Shiro’s friendly, unknowing stare. 

“They asked for an iPhone,” he says, laughing, “and one of those speakers that you can ask about the weather and it talks to you. Maybe, if I save some money, I can at least buy them a charger for one and they’ll be on their way to putting the whole thing together.”

Lance’s laughter sounds so strangled and stiff that it seems to be more of a cough. The water in the bottom of his cup has been jostled to such a degree that there’s barely any left for his suddenly-parched throat, but he doesn’t know if he has the strength to lean forward, that much closer to Shiro, to refill it. 

He drags in a shaky breath, crushing the wax paper in his hands. 

“Y-yeah, my person was good,” he says then, so quiet that he almost can’t hear his own words over Romelle’s phone conversation, or his own breathing, or the buzzing of the heat as it kicks on again, “I’m probably just… gonna make something for them.”

Shiro’s eyes light up immediately, and he straightens his posture, seemingly without even realizing it. There’s an excited energy about him now, as though he’s just discovered that Lance runs the fanclub of his favorite band, and the two of them suddenly have so much more to talk about. 

“You’re hand-making it?” he asks quickly, so fast that the words almost sound to be one elongated syllable, “That’s amazing! I’ve always wished that I was good at crafts.”

Lance doesn’t have the heart to tell him that some sugar scrubs and bath bombs aren’t exactly the peak of artistic ability and that it probably won’t take him longer than a few hours or more than twenty bucks to put the whole thing together. He feels too put on the spot by Shiro’s abrupt admiration, and while he does feel somewhat guilty basking in it when he doesn’t deserve it, he can’t deny that finding something about himself that impresses Shiro, albeit perhaps rooted in a lie that would diminish the majority of that admiration, it’s a really nice feeling. To be seen by him, noticed for more than his frequently deteriorating health in this hellscape of a workplace. It feels nice to find himself stationed so perfectly in the center of Shiro’s attention, and even as he reaches up a hand to rub idly at the back of his burning neck, even as he can’t think of the right words to say to charm Shiro further, he has to admit that this moment alone is making it harder and harder to ever commit to finally putting an end to his hopeless crush.

Until, of course, uninvited and definitely not wanted here, now, during perhaps the beginnings of the only good memory that Lance will ever have in this building, another voice joins them.

“Excuse me, sirs.” It’s smooth and deep and liquid dogshit. Lance immediately feels his skin prickle and his previous starstruck expression warping into one of distaste. “Are you actually using the water cooler, or are you slacking off on company time?”

When Lance wheels around to fix Lotor with a stare harsh enough that he has to understand what sort of moment he’s impeding on, it takes an enormous amount of self-control not to fire back, “Oh, you mean like you do all the time?”

Thankfully, for the sake of Lance’s employment here and his good graces in Shiro’s perpetually kind and good-natured eyes, he resists the urge. He clears his throat instead, crushing his wax-coated cup in his palm once again and huffing out a short, “excuse me,” before he shoves past Lotor in the general direction of his cubicle. 

He doesn’t even notice that he didn’t throw his cup away until he gets back to his desk. He shoves it into the mini-trash can underneath, dropping his head down to rest against the cold faux-wood of it. He feels bad for leaving Shiro to deal with Lotor, but he has no reason to believe that the two of them couldn’t be friends. Shiro seems to get along with everyone, and maybe he’s more tactful. Maybe he’s exactly the kind of person who can put up with Lotor’s bullshit without losing his mind.

Hunk peeks over the shared wall between their desks, and Lance can feel him there, glancing at him nervously, for a very long time. They don’t exchange words, and eventually, Lance finds the strength to pull himself up and start working on his excel sheet again. He punches in the numbers without really registering them in his thoughts. He thinks about Shiro’s smiling face instead, how he’d tittered with a nervous excitement that was so genuine and comely and so painfully _ Shiro _ . 

He wishes that he knew how to knit or to woodwork, or how to make any sort of homemade craft that might blow Shiro’s expectations out of the water.

But, at the very least, when he visits the drug store later on to buy supplies, he spends an obscene amount of time sniffing the different scents and reading over the different ingredients until he can settle on the most pleasurable concoctions that a human might be capable of collecting from a drug store.

 

* * *

 

Hunk stands over the sink with his fingers pinching his nostrils, a vain attempt to stop the flurry of sneezes that have been wracking his body since Lance started mixing the various scents together for the face scrub, the bath bombs, and the body wash that he’d settled on making. They don’t smell as nice all mixed together in a thick cloud in the bathroom, but maybe once they’re given time to settle, and if Shiro doesn’t have the bright idea of using every single one of them in the same bathtub at the same time, they might still be a salvageable gift. 

Hunk seems to beg to differ, but he hasn’t said so yet in so many words. He doesn’t seem to remember when Lance used to make these things in college, how his apartment always reeked of contradicting scents that lived together in the fibers of his furniture and clothes, forever marking him with a weird, unnameable smell of a body shop. His general smell during that period was always confusing and too much, headache-inducing on even the best days. Even airing out his dorm hadn’t done much for it, as they’ve opened the bathroom windows now. He still remembers one of the new residents messaging him on Facebook just a few months after he’d moved from the dorm into an apartment and asking him, “What the Hell did you do in here? It smells like someone made a nuke out of every Lush store in the country and set it off in this dorm.”

He’d be lying if he said that he wasn’t a little proud of that, but the smell persists even now, even years later, as he’s attempted to tweak the formula just a little, in order to cut down on the abrasive scents. His head is just starting to hurt from it, but he knows that it’ll fade somewhat the longer that the products sit. They’ll steep and become more subtle, and hopefully, they’ll stay only smelly enough for Shiro to catch a hint of them through the wrapping paper, and to be able to enjoy the smells each time that he uses them in the bath. Lance knows that Shiro already has perfect, flawless skin, and he already smells nice. He takes very good care of himself, but maybe that’s exactly why this is a good gift. Maybe, it’s a way of telling him that Lance has taken notice of his self-care regime, and he’s only hoping to enrich it with a few thoughtful, handmade products.

On the other end of the spectrum, he worries that maybe Shiro will think that he’s telling him to do better. He smells weird, he needs to switch it up. He tries to tell himself that Shiro, of all people, wouldn’t take this sort of gift as an affront. But the longer that he ruminates in the slowly-settled, hyper-scented juices of his DIY project, the more he feels like an idiot for wasting his money and time when he could have just bought Shiro one of those “Make-Your-Own Hot Chocolate” kits instead. They were on sale when he bought his supplies. He could have made things easier for himself and burdened Shiro so much less if he’d just put his feeling aside for once and decided not to be an over-dramatic idiot.

“Do you still have that gift-wrapping stuff from, you know… when you used to make this stuff all the time?”

Hunk’s question is spoken in a stiff and stuffy way, his voice pitched up and buzzing around the tight hold that he has around his nose. And Lance nods once with a quiet hum, before craning his neck further forward to watch as the bath bombs solidify slowly. 

“I picked up some stuff for that, too, when I bought the ingredients.”

He doesn’t have the nerve to tell Hunk that he might have gone over budget with the supplies alone. And Hunk definitely doesn’t need to know that he spent all of last night awake at his desk, decorating even the plastic wrap that he’ll inevitably put all of these in. Glitter still clings under his fingernails and he can still smell the phantom scent of the craft glue that he’d used clinging to the inside of his nose. His fingers are dyed with various dark shades of blue and purple at the tips, and he hopes desperately that some vinegar or rubbing alcohol will remove the majority of it, at least, before his shift starts tomorrow.

The Christmas party isn’t until Friday, and it’s still his Sunday off. He’d figured that getting a head start would be fine for these products. He’ll keep them preserved in the freezer. He already wrote the storage instructions on a small, decorated piece of cardstock that he’ll tuck with the wrapped bombs and body wash and face scrub in the bag that he’d selected.

He knows that he’s putting too much effort into this, but it feels a little bit like his last hurrah.

The final chance that he’ll have to catch Shiro’s eye before he finally gives up.

And he knows that, when all is said and done, he can never say that he didn’t at least try.

 

* * *

 

The party planning committee went out of their way to decorate the office for this year’s party. Last year, Lance remembers, they’d put out a small tree in the corner and hung a few sparkly paper decorations, but it was definitely nothing like this. He wonders if Lotor might have begged his dad to allow them a bigger budget this year. He knows that the guy has a thing for Allura, and maybe he wanted to impress her by flexing his muscles in a way that might benefit her. Lance doesn’t know why the idea of that makes him feel so sick with anger, when he can’t realistically claim that he isn’t doing something more or less the same.

He might not have the necessary connections to throw Shiro a nice holiday office bash like this one, but to the best of his ability, he’s pulled out all of the stops. His gift wrap turned out even better than he might have been able to purchase in-store. He’d been so excited when he’d put it all together that he hadn’t been able to stop himself from snapping a photo to send to his mom. And she’d called him, of course, to ask which lucky person might have been on the receiving end of such a gift, and when he’d told her, flustered, that he’d gotten Shiro in the office Secret Santa, he could practically hear her judgment taking physical form over the phone.

“Are you really still hung up on that guy?”

And he is, even now. Even after the long talk that he’d had with his mom about it. Even after all of these years of Shiro never noticing him, even after they parted ways and became reacquainted. But, at the very least, if he has to have his feelings crushed after a decade of helpless pining, if he has to break his own stupid heart by presenting a gift that he’s spent a cumulative seventy-six hours preparing for a guy who barely knows his name, at the very least he can do so among the garland and the twinkling lights, and the animatronic Santa that ‘Ho Ho Ho’s every time that someone passes by it to use the copier.

They’re just finishing their shift as Allura puts the finishing touches on the tree. Lotor is flanked behind her, reaching above her and pressing into her back in a way that makes Lance and Hunk share a deadpan look before collectively rolling their eyes. He places the sparkling star atop it, as Allura fiddles with the ornaments. And they do look charming together, pretty and picturesque like a couple from a holiday catalog—Allura in her pink turtleneck and dark skirt, with her untarnished stockings beneath laced with glitter that sparkles under the fluorescent lights above. And Lotor, in this stupid Banana Republic sweater vest, smiling that shit-eating grin that Lance would love nothing more than to punch out. Handsome and polished in a way that never fails to make his anger flare ever-hotter.

Allura is kind and she cares about the holidays and parties and everyone around the office. And Lance can’t help but feel as though, despite his handsome face, if Allura ever even considered settling down with him, it would be just as much of a downgrade as Shiro actually lowering himself to dating an average joe like Lance.

It just doesn’t feel right, but maybe not in the same way. Lance knows that he isn’t nearly as annoying and gawky and ugly on the outside as Lotor is within. But he does know that Shiro deserves someone who shines like Allura, someone put-together and charming who always knows the right thing to say. Who doesn’t stain their fingers making smelly DIY bath products that stink up their apartment so bad that their neighbors complain to the landlord.

Allura and Shiro deserve partners who make the world feel brighter just by being in it, as they do. They deserve partners who carry themselves with an importance and a kindness, and an amazing understanding of the universe around them that makes everyone fortunate enough to know them feel just the smallest shred of hope that they’re not doomed.

Allura deserves a conniving dickhead like Lotor just as much as Shiro deserves a boring loser like Lance. And it makes Lance feel guilty for even courting him, for even thinking for a moment that it’s been fair to him, all this time, to keep chasing after him when the planets just won’t align in the right way to make their relationship ever make sense.

So Lance finds himself sticking to his cubicle throughout most of the party. He keeps fretting with the tissue paper inside of his gift bag under his desk, rearranging it and crinkling it often as though to remind himself that it’s still there. Hunk brings him a variety plate of everything from the limited buffet. He drinks sparkling grape juice out of a wax-coated cup, and he listens to the distant laughter and conversation hanging low below the music that filters through the speakers overhead.

He’s really messed up this time.

He can’t leave because he doesn’t want Shiro to go home without a gift. He doesn’t want Shiro to feel as though his Santa cared so little about him that they didn’t even bother getting him anything. But it’s 7 pm and the party is in full swing, and the closest drug store is thirty minutes away. He wouldn’t make it back in time to throw something else together. It would be too obvious that he didn’t give his replacement gift any thought. 

And Shiro knows now that he claimed to have handmade something for the event, so he’s screwed—five ways in every direction—and fated to humiliate himself in front of the one person who he’s worked so hard to avoid in fear of humiliating himself for the last ten years.

His train of thought comes to an abrupt halt when he can hear the conversation dying down. Allura’s voice booms loud enough that it even drowns out the Christmas music, and he wonders if she might have fastened herself some kind of paper megaphone in hopes that she could make her announcements clearly enough.

“The Secret Santa exchange is starting soon!” She bellows, her voice graceful in ways that Lance is quickly feeling devoid of. “Everyone, please meet me by the buffet table! We’ve set out chairs for everyone to sit in a circle! Don’t forget your gifts!”

It’s the final death toll, the swan song before Lance hands over his final shreds of dignity to none other than the angel who’s haunted his intrusive thoughts since he was a teen. It’s harder to drag himself away from his cubicle than anything else has ever been for him, and with a long, shuddered breath, he resigns himself to his terrible fate as he leans down to grab his gift bag by the strings.

He trudges over to the circle, just a few cubicles away. They’ve pushed aside a few of the desks and tables, and as promised, there’s a small circle of chairs all pressed close together, with only one narrow gap for participants to slip through before they find their seats. Lance purses his lips when he spots Hunk already cushioned between Romelle and Pidge. He sends Hunk a lingering glare, as though to punctuate what a dastardly betrayal this really was, before he tucks himself into a seat across from them. He watches with a dry, closed throat as Shiro, too, slides between bodies and situates himself with just one seat between himself and Lance. He’s holding a small, messily-wrapped box in one hand, flicking his gaze from face to face and smiling in greeting as Allura takes a seat on the opposite side of him. Of course, they’re friends. Lance wouldn’t have expected anything else.

Allura’s expression is just a little stiff as Lotor takes a seat next to her and begins chatting. She’s nodding just barely, not meeting his eyes. 

“You’ll have to make it up to him later,” She says lowly, obviously unhappy about whatever he’s just told her, “Why in the world would you put it in one car if you were going to take another to work?”

It seems, from the limited amount of context that Lance has been given, that Lotor hasn’t brought his gift. This is only proven more likely when Lance peeks at his lap, around his legs and in his hands, and there’s no package to be found. He almost laughs—of course, the asshole couldn’t do even one thing for another person if it didn’t benefit him in some way. Whatever sorry sucker got him, he pities them. He can’t imagine how embarrassing it would be to actually put time and effort into a gift, only to be one of the only people left at the end of the exchange with nothing to show for it.

It might feel a little bit like being picked last in gym class, or finding that you don’t have a partner during a team project in chemistry. He knows, realistically, that it isn’t the same, but he can’t help but feel a stab of pity for whomever Lotor might have passed over when he’d decided to “forget” his gift. It makes him wish that maybe he would have attempted the run to the drug store, if only so he could have something to cover for them. Maybe it wouldn’t be much, but it would be something, and he’s sure that it would definitely be better than sitting alone with nothing, surrounded by happy people with packages in their hands.

He draws in a sigh. Maybe it’s better to just keep his focus on his own present for now. To normal people, maybe life isn’t all about who’s popular and who gets the best things. Maybe he should have left that mindset behind when he graduated. He isn’t sure, because it still feels like Lotor holds himself in higher esteem than everyone else. And his father definitely didn’t bother to attend this party with the rest of them, just as he never has in the years prior.

Maybe there’s some kind of hierarchy. Maybe Lance has drawn a hand just as pathetic here, as an adult, as he pulled when he was a teen.

And maybe he won’t find that out unless he garners the nerve to give Shiro his gift—despite his shaking hands and his pounding heart, and the feeling that he might vomit if Shiro so much as smiles in his direction or thanks him in that low, rough voice that he often has in the morning that makes Lance’s knees feel like they’ve melted into goo.

He distracts himself from all of the terrible ‘what if’s by focusing his attention, instead, on Allura as she announces the rules of the game. She starts with herself, seated just after Lotor, and says that each person in line will stand up and walk their give over to the person for whom it’s intended. It’s simple enough, but Lance isn’t sure if he trusts his legs. And with only two people between himself and Allura—only one person between himself and Shiro—he’s going to have so little time to find the inner strength to actually present this embarrassing gift that he isn’t sure if he’ll be much better than Lotor in Allura’s mind when this is all said and done.

Allura walks her gift to Hunk, which turns out to be a very nice measuring cup set that he’d mentioned wanting earlier in the year. They chat about it for a short moment, before he thanks her softly, and Lance wonders if he could ever have the finesse to pull off an exchange so easy. After Allura, Shiro reaches around her and hands Lotor his small wrapped package. Lance can’t bring himself to watch that exchange, boiling in sudden anger as he thinks about the fact that shitty, giftless Lotor really had the honor of receiving something that Shiro clearly tried to wrap by hand. He hates that Lotor sounds thankful for it, and that he’s kind, even though surely something valued at $20 or less isn’t anything that he’d ever care about. He hates that he and Shiro seem to get along, and that any of this is happening when someone else among them will end up giftless because of the same asshole who’s now inspecting a brand new  _ something _ —that Lance can’t make out from around Shiro and Allura. 

Matt, between Lance and Shiro, wanders off to hand a gift to someone else in the circle. Lance crinkles the bag in his hands, tears dotting the corners of his eyes in the most embarrassing display of his own nervousness that he could have possibly comprehended. And when Matt takes his seat again, a moment so long stretches out between it and Lance actually getting on his stupid, useless noodly legs and marching his gift in Shiro’s direction that Allura calls out a gentle, “Lance? Are you okay?”

Lance chokes audibly, smothering under the sudden awkwardness that he’s just pulled over his head like a plastic bag. He nods so quickly and jerkily up and down that the bag in his hands shakes. He can hear the plastic bottles clinking together and the bath bombs heavy as they clunk into them. He steels himself, swallows every ounce of his pride and shame and fear, and slowly, he clambers to his feet.

The death march toward one Takashi Shirogane feels as though it takes millennia more than the five seconds that it might be in reality. Shiro’s smile up at him is strangely bashful and eager, but Lance convinces himself in a whirlwind of thought that it’s just a trick of the light and his own stupid, hyper-romantic thoughts. 

He shoves the bag closer to Shiro, dropping it the moment that Shiro’s fingers brush against the sides. This leaves Shiro jerking forward to catch it before it falls to the floor, and Lance apologizing in a voice that sounds entirely too loud for how quiet it’s grown around them.

Lance feels as though he’s experienced a hundred brain hemorrhages by the time that Shiro fishes the paper out of the bag. And he can smell the fragrances of his gift, even from half a foot away. They’re more subtle now, but he’s regretting using lavender and peppermint. He’s regretting the questionable decision to make the body wash gingerbread scented when it clashes so terribly with the more floral smells.

But Shiro raises one of the bath bombs and inspects it. It’s the purple one with swatches of blue mixed in. It’s berry scented, and it’s too feminine. And this was a bad idea, he hates himself. He wants nothing more than to dash for the door and never step foot in this office again.

“You made these?” Shiro’s voice is a knife cutting sharp through his rush of frantic thoughts. “These smell amazing, Lance—”

He pauses to press the bath bomb closer to his nose, leaning to the side slightly as Allura reaches into the bag and shoves her face closer to take a smell as well.

“It’s perfect,” Shiro tells him, “I—I really love it, thank you.”

Lance turns on his heel without a word, and he shoves himself so hard back into his seat that it scrapes loudly against the floor. He can hear Lotor mutter something to Allura, but his blood is rushing too fast in his ears to catch it. He feels like he’s going to throw up. He buries his face in his hands.

Slowly, the gift exchanges resumes, but he can’t find the strength to pay attention anymore. His cheeks feel scorched against his palms, and his heart never stops its incessant pounding. He can’t stop thinking about what an idiot he is, not even able to say “you’re welcome” when he so clearly did a good job. When it matters, when Shiro was focusing that sunshine smile straight up at him, flushed with joy and so touched because of Lance, of course, because he’s a useless idiot who can’t do anything right, Lance couldn’t even accept his victory without tarnishing it.

It isn’t until he can hear the chair next to him being pulled away that he realizes that the gift exchange is over. Everyone has left the circle to converse with their Santas and their giftees about their presents. Allura is tucked away in the corner, bickering quietly with Lotor about one thing or another, and Shiro, it seems, is nowhere to be found. Lance’s heart pinches when he peers across the office and spots Romelle hanging off of Hunk’s arm. Even through his misery, he smiles, almost laughs, at the idea that after all is said and done, Hunk managed to get over his fears and admit to Romelle that he cares about her. It’s sweet, watching them. There’s a part of him, that he’d never admit to out loud, that’s almost excited to return to work after the holiday weekend and hear all of Hunk’s stories about how everything went down.

Lance’s ears burn though, as he realizes that no one ever gave him a gift. When he realizes that Lotor must have forgotten his because, of course, he got Lance. Because neither of them like each other, and Allura must have been trying so desperately to bridge some gap between them when she paired them up. It’s just the right way to cap off his humiliating experience tonight. It’s enough to cement his spot as the last kid picked in gym class and the kid with no chem partner, even a decade later, when none of that should even matter anymore.

There’s a lot swirling around in his thoughts now, cementing him to his seat well longer than he should reasonably be sitting. Everyone else had the good sense and manners to drag their chairs back into the conference room, and he can see Matt, some ways away, dithering as though he’s considering coming over and asking if he can move Lance’s as well. But inevitably, he drops it, and he turns back to his group. The party is dwindling down now, and various coworkers are chatting about going out for drinks. Lance isn’t surprised that no one invites him along to cheer him up, but despite his more self-deprecating emotions telling him that this is yet another reason why he’s a loser, he knows that it’s just too awkward to breach the subject when surely they have no idea what his little freak-out was all about earlier.

And with a sigh, he resigns himself to the knowledge that Shiro probably feels the same. There has to be a good reason why he isn’t here, now, either stuck between Allura and Lotor’s whispered argument or sending Lance a few wayward looks from across the room, as though gauging his emotions now and trying to figure out what the deal is for himself. 

Finally, Lance shoves up from his seat. He drags his chair back into the conference room and tucks it into an empty spot against the wall. When he exits the conference room, Allura is standing, alone, with her hands wringing and tucked up against her. She’s smiling at him with the same heartbreaking softness that she might offer him in the event of a family death.

“Lance,” She says, “I’m very sorry… about everything. I really thought—”

He cuts her off with a gentle hand on her shoulder. For a moment, he worries that this might be too much physical contact considering the semi-distant, very co-workerly relationship that they share, but she doesn’t twitch uncomfortably and she doesn’t shirk away as though he’s done something very weird.

“Allura, it’s okay, I promise. I know you were just trying to give everyone a good Christmas, and… you care about all of us, I know that too. It means a lot. But it’s also okay, I just…”

“—You’re embarrassed about Shiro.”

Their eyes meet—his wide and his throat dry and thick, hers, gentle and knowing in a way that reminds him entirely too much of the way that his mother used to look at him when he was a little kid.

“I see the way that you look at him,” She says then, “And the two of you do actually have a lot in common. I know that tonight feels like a failure to you, but if you talk to him, I think you’ll find that things went a lot better than they might have seemed.”

His heart patters in his chest, and he allows his hand to drop from her shoulder and for his arm to hang limply between them. After a moment, he raises it to scratch at the nape of his neck, dragging his eyes from her face to the floor between their feet, then to the twinkling garland sparkling in the light above them.

“Shiro hasn’t noticed me since high school, Allura,” he tells her, “I think it’s probably about time that I just… let it go.”

She doesn’t argue with him as he brushes past her, and her “Merry Christmas” after he grabs his bag from his cubicle and slips through the door into the hall is quiet and sad and so far away that he almost forgets to return it.

The hallway and the waiting area for the elevator are barren and silent. He can hear the humming of the Christmas music as he pushes the button and waits for the doors to open. He wonders if he should have stayed behind and helped her clean up. He wonders if he should have been more comforting and supportive since he suspects that him not getting a gift might have been harder on her than it was on him.

Allura takes things like this very personally, he understands that. She wants all of them to get along. And Lance knows that there must be  _ some _ good in Lotor, something worth cherishing that’s drawn both Shiro and Allura to him when both of them are light and goodness incarnate. Fundamentally, he can understand that, but as he steps into the elevator and leans against the wall, dragging in another long breath and scrubbing a hand over his still-hot cheeks, he can’t help but feel as though he’s been left out on some big, cosmic joke. He can’t think of a single facet of Lotor’s character that wouldn’t grind the nerves of even the most patient and understanding person. He has absolutely no clue how anyone can handle spending more than five seconds alone with the guy without wanting to pull their hair out.

But maybe Allura was disappointed in Lotor because the version that she knows would have done better. Maybe, Lotor had found himself unceremoniously torn between these two very different aspects of his person: the one who dislikes Lance enough to embarrass him in front of everyone when he’s the only one not leaving with a gift, and the one who’s reliable and kindhearted, who willingly takes a break from lazing around the office to help Allura put the finishing touches on the tree.

And that leads Lance to the final resting place of his thoughts, as he listens to the sound of the Christmas music fading, the hum of the elevator dropping from floor to floor, the sound of his own breathing just now calming after his freakout earlier. He wonders if there’s a version of Shiro that he doesn’t know, too. If there’s a Shiro who feels insecure sometimes, or a Shiro who gets embarrassed easily or makes mistakes. He can’t imagine Shiro feeling out of place anywhere, as a beautiful, charming, funny and interesting person who has many important things to say. He can’t remove himself from his idol worship long enough to imagine that maybe, even people like Shiro waste their time chasing after other people who won’t ever love them. Maybe Shiro, too, is just trying to find one good thing that helps him get out of bed in the morning, that might make the monotonous drag of their word days feel like, in some shape or form, maybe it’s worth it.

But he doesn’t have the rest of the night to consider this, or to break himself free from his still-persistent feelings that Shiro might exist only as a bright light in Lance’s dreary mornings, and he might set into sleep like the sun beyond the horizon the moment that he’s removed from human eyes. Lance understands the troublesome aspects of expecting a person to be anything but human, but normal and flawed in the very same way that he might be, as well. But it’s hard to think of Shiro brushing his teeth in the morning, or realizing that his coffee maker is broken, and nearly crying when he doesn’t have any caffeine to fill his cup. It’s hard to envision Shiro wrapped up in three layers of blankets because his apartment isn’t well insulated, stuffed in an oversized sweater with old grease stains and holes, in mismatched socks, too, like Lance spends a lot of his weekends. Stationed in front of the television and drowning himself in the stories of people living much better lives than this.

But the perfect Shiro in his head meets the surely flawed and clearly flustered Shiro that stands just in front of the elevator doors when they slide open, like a clap of thunder or the blast of a canon in Lance’s ears. These images are hard to separate, because Shiro in the flesh is so pretty, so absolutely life-ruiningly beautiful that he’s barely different than the ethereal imagery that Lance has just conjured up in his imagination. But the Shiro in front of him isn’t dressed in decade-old gym sweats and eating cookie dough straight from the container. The Shiro who clears his throat and jerks back as though to give Lance room to pass by him, apologizing profusely, isn’t flipping through the channels to find his favorite reality TV show.

He’s dressed in his coat, and he’s carrying Lance’s gift bag tight in his fingers at his side. There’s a thick, woolen scarf wrapped around his neck—a nice lavender shade that sits nicely against his pale skin—and his cheeks are hot, scarlet. Lance’s attention is hyper-focused on the pink tongue that darts out quickly to wet his lips.

“L-Lance, uh, hey.” He waves with his prosthetic, and Lance can hear the joints of it clicking, with the jerky force with which he moves about. “I was… I was hoping to catch you before you went home.”

Lance’s brows draw together. He can’t catch his thoughts quickly enough as they fly past. Shiro was waiting for him down here, and he wonders for how long. Why was he waiting, what could he possibly want? Is he ready for round two? Does he think that if he prods harder, Lance will do some other terrible, humiliating thing that Shiro can go home and tell all of his stupid jock friends about?

He opens his mouth, snapping it closed seconds later. His work bag feels heavy over his shoulder, and he dreads the walk to the bus. Outside, snow is falling lightly. He can see the outlines of it sparkling in the street lamp just at the mouth of the parking lot. He just wants to go home. He just wants to put on his most comfortable pair of pajamas and eat ice cream until he goes into a coma. He wants to call his mom and cry. He wants to fall asleep and forget that this day ever happened, that he was ever idiotic enough to think that he’d have a chance of shining in Shiro’s pretty eyes.

“Were you waiting down here?” Lance asks in place of any of his earlier mental accusations, “Like… this whole time?”

He can hear the words coming out harsher than hopeful, and he winces just as they finish leaving his mouth. Shiro’s cheeks grow darker pink, and his brows bow in the middle. The gift in his hand jostles as he raises both in front of him defensively, sputtering for a short moment before he pauses, swallows, and noticeably avoids Lance’s eyes. 

And then, after a moment, after Lance finally steps through the elevator and the doors close behind him, Shiro draws out a timid, quiet response.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I just… I felt like we might have gotten off on the wrong foot, you see—”

He bites his lip, taking another step away from Lance and tipping back his head. He takes a deep, calming breath, and this moment is so surreal to Lance that none of the reassurances that are currently bubbling in his thoughts survive long enough to breach his lips.

“If we’re being honest, Lance, I’ve… I’ve been interested in you since I started working here. I mean, I know that we’ve never talked much, but… I always kind of noticed you, and… You’ve always been cute. And I thought that maybe I could actually bring myself to talk to you and get to know you, but… I’ve stuck out, like, a lot.”

His laughter then is awkward and his cheeks are practically glowing redder than the obnoxious Rudolph nose on the Christmas party poster behind him on the wall. Outside, tail lights skim through the darkness, and another two or three cars pull out of the parking lot and rumble down the street, going home. Suddenly, Lance isn’t sure if he’s so eager to join them. Just like that, he’s wondering if he could really exist in this moment for the rest of his life. If God, for once, would ever be so kind to him.

But Shiro continues, and through his rampant thoughts and prevailing embarrassment, Lance grapples to hear him.

“I’m sorry that I’ve been weird, and if… I’ve made you uncomfortable. At first, I thought maybe you were just shy, but the more I tried to talk, the more you pulled away, and I really should have taken it as a sign to give up, but—I-I just. I really thought, when you gave me this gift, maybe it was all in my head and we could get to know each other, but it’s so inappropriate for me to keep pushing you like this and if you want me to, I will absolutely respect your boundaries and—”

“W-wait—wait, Shiro, I—I… what?”

Lance’s voice is too loud and too slurred and shaken to sound like much more than a sputtering record tape. His breath is ragged and his thoughts soar and spin wildly in his dumb, empty head, and he doesn’t even know for certain if this is a real thing that’s actually happening to him, or if he’s just imagined all of it.

“You… you like me?”

Shiro’s laughter is neither insulting nor crude, and for once, Lance has a hard time imagining that he’s thinking the worst of him. Shiro is pursing his lips, then chewing briefly on the bottom one before sucking in his cheek. He keeps fumbling with his gift as though he wants to keep it in his line of sight at all times, as though he can’t stop fretting with it, and remembering it, and reminding himself that it’s really there.

This is all a lot to take in, and Lance hopes that, while Shiro doesn’t mention the way that he discreetly pinches himself, maybe he doesn’t notice it either. 

But the pinch hurts, and the dream world in which he currently stands and sways and swoons so terrible doesn’t dissipate even as his nails dig into the skin of his upper arm. This is somehow reality, even if it’s completely ridiculous, and Lance realizes that Shiro is nodding, and admitting that he does, in fact, like him, and none of this is some embellished story that he’s telling Hunk or a dream that he had the other night, or a thought in the back of his head, an illustrious “someday” fantasy that while unrealistic still gives him the strength to get out of bed even on the coldest of mornings. 

So in this reality, in this bizarre moment in which Shiro has the gall to look worried and sound concerned that somehow his chiseled jaw and firm muscles and generally angelic presence might actually offend some lowly, normal human, Lance realizes that he now has the floor. He has the opportunity to speak, and he wastes it, fumbles it so profoundly that his ancestors ten generations back are currently rolling in their graves.

“I’ve liked you since high school.”

Six words, and that’s all that it takes to sign Lance’s death warrant. The surprised widening of Shiro’s pretty, dark eyes and the blanch of his skin spreading from cheeks to ears and down his throat is enough indication that Lance has said more than enough to persuade him to change his mind. But he takes a moment to offer Lance that pretty, harmonious laugh, and to comb a hand through his hair and crane his neck to peer through the front door into the shadowed, snow-capped street.

“Well then,” he says, too smooth and too casual to be breaking Lance’s heart, but Lance waits for it anyway. He couldn’t imagine Shiro not being gorgeous even when turning him down, and he isn’t sure if he’d accept it any other way. “I noticed that Lotor didn’t get you anything for the exchange, so… maybe I could make up for it? There’s a diner just down the street that’s… not great, but… maybe it’ll be my IOU. Like, a rehearsal dinner before the real one. Do you think… you’d be willing to come have dinner with me? If you aren’t too busy?”

Lance can’t stop himself from snorting, as though he’s ever had an after-work plan in his life. As though anything short of his own death would ever stop him from taking one Takashi Shirogane up on an offer for a late-night date to a “not great” diner that might still be the best damn dinner that he’ll ever have the pleasure of engaging in.

He still isn’t sure if he believes that any of this is real. He still doesn’t know if he’ll wake up to the sound of his phone’s alarm the moment that they step through the front door into the parking lot.

But he beams up at Shiro, and Shiro smiles back.

And when he says, “I’d love to” this scene doesn’t disappear, he doesn’t open his eyes to the morning sun and the still-agonizing lack of a coffee smell since the death of his beloved coffee maker.

Shiro offers his arm for Lance to wind his own around. And the night is cold and dark, and Shiro’s car swerves just a little in the freshly-frozen ice. The bath bombs and body wash fill the interior with a clashing mixture of too-strong smells within moments of the bag being carefully placed in the back. And when they get to the diner, Shiro was right. The food isn’t great, but the conversation, and the experiences, and the realization that this is real and it’s happening, and for once, everything worked out—

Lance can’t help but feel as though even ten years of pining were worth it. Secret Santa was worth it. Even dealing with Lotor’s smarmy ass day after day was worth it.

Because Shiro smiles and he laughs and he tells interesting stories and funny jokes, and at the end of the night, when he walks Lance to the door of his apartment building, he kisses him so gently that the world feels warm and melted around them. 

It’s a very, very good night.

**Author's Note:**

> feliz navidad, kris! soy tu santa secreto este año! esta historia estuvo muy divertida y espero que te guste mucho! es un honor escribir shance para ti otra vez. feliz shancemas! Mucho amor!!! te amo!! gracias por seguir leyendo!!
> 
> [tumblr](http://curionabang.tumblr.com), [twitter](https://twitter.com/mothisland)


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